Delirium
by blackballoons
Summary: Four years eleven months and twenty-seven days have passed since Samantha left Seattle. Now she has returned with a new identity, but what will happen when she comes face-to-face with the ghosts from the life she wishes to forget? Past Sam/Freddie.
1. Homeless Heart

**Delirium**

She is twenty-two with a broken heart that is four years eleven months and twenty-seven days old.

* * *

She began shedding her identity three days and sixteen hours after leaving Seattle, ditching Samantha Puckett in her wake as she drove and never looked back.

She went from blonde to brunette in a gas station bathroom that smelt like stale sweat in Olympia. She salvaged flat irons from a trash can in Portland. She stole boxes of hazel coloured contact lenses from Wal-Mart in Salem. She adopted the name Stefanie Plackett in Sacramento by swiping a wallet containing all the I.D she needed from an unsuspecting young woman's purse. She stopped eating in San Francisco so her face lost its roundness and her sharp bone structure began to show through, all chiselled cheekbones and razor sharp chin, protruding hip bones and visible rib cage. She walked away with a suitcase belonging to a girl who looked around her dress size in a coach station in Fremont. She dyed her hair and stole from stores and changed her name whilst thinking of the new life she was paving for herself.

She became a shadow of her former self, exactly what she wanted to be. There was nothing left to tie her to her old life in Seattle and she was stupid enough to believe that she could forget everything that happened with a click of her fingers, with a metamorphosis into a brand new girl.

Subconsciously she was turning into the girl she never was but always wanted to be. Brunette, brown eyes, ring any bells?

Jealousy, along with other factors, makes you do crazy things.

* * *

She was eighteen years twenty-one hours and ten minutes old when she left Seattle, her broken heart riding shotgun as she sped from the Rain City.

* * *

She is back in Seattle and she doesn't know how it happened, why she is here or what she is doing.

She's sat on the sidewalk and the heavens open up above her, pouring enough rain on the city to match the tears sliding down her face, her clothes soaked through and her nose red from the cold. Her car is parked a half-mile away in a parking lot beside an empty warehouse but her limbs ache and the weight on her shoulders is too heavy for her to move an inch. She is wet now anyway. The sanctuary of a car with a broken heater will not make her dry.

The sky is an empty dark canvas and she has no idea what time it is, let alone what day of the week it is. She's been counting the days since her departure because it is the one solitary thing that is holding her back from the brink of insanity. She thinks the sky looks beautiful, an empty black void to match the hole in her chest where her heart should be and she becomes so engrossed in the vastness that she fails to hear the feet coming towards her, slapping in the puddles on the pavement. Leather shoes come to a stop beside her and she looks down at the shoes before diverting her eyes to the water splashing in the gutter, hoping that whoever it is will go away and leave her alone to piece her puzzle together.

Only the person is persistent, annoyingly so, and they sit down beside her on the dirty floor, risking catching a cold at her expense.

"Excuse me, are you okay?" The person asks and although she can barely hear over the pounding rain she knows the voice belongs to a male and she shrinks away from him, hoping he isn't assuming she is a prostitute waiting in the torrential downpour for a customer, seeing as no one else in their right mind would be out in this weather.

She doesn't do that anymore. She isn't so desperate for cash that she feels the need to sell her body in a Las Vegas brothel.

"I'm fine," she bites back, sweeping a hand across her face and spreading her smudged make-up further down her hollow cheeks.

She's not fine. She's been to hell and back. She sold her soul to the devil. She is in a city that feels like a foreign country. She has no idea what she is doing. She has exactly fifty dollars to her name. She is going to have to sleep in the backseat of her car with threadbare blankets. She doesn't want to be Stefanie Plackett anymore. She'd like Samantha Puckett back. She wants a reset button to take her back to the time she was young and beautiful. She wants to throw herself under a truck. She has a heart that has been broken for four years eleven months and twenty seven days.

And she is twenty-three in three days.

"Look, I have a nice warm apartment and you need to get inside before you catch your death," he speaks again and the voice sounds familiar, but she passes it off as her mind playing tricks on her because she hasn't slept in nearly thirty-six hours.

"How do I know you're not a serial killer?" she sneezes as rain drips from the end of her nose, still not looking up as she stares at her bare feet.

She knows how to look after herself, knows she has to be wary of men. Men steal your innocence. Men hurt you in ways you never thought were possible. Men rip your dreams to shreds. Men break your heart. Men leave you cold and senseless. Men never return your love.

Men rape you.

"Trust me."

Those two words hit her like a bullet to the chest, knocking her back to seventeen and in love, heart in tact and never happier. They are like a stab in the gut, the pouring of blood bringing the flooding of memories that leave her doubled over in pain, head in her hands as she begs for the voice stuck on repeat to stop taunting her. _Trust me. Trust me. **Trust me and I'll break your heart**_. She dares a glance at his face and it is the catalyst that sends her world spiralling into turmoil. She sees him beneath the thin layer of stubble and sad eyes, behind the mop of dark hair and chapped lips. Of course she knows him, how could she not. His eighteen year old face is burnt on the back of her eyelids as a constant reminder of her past, of what she left behind.

She has to laugh, bitterly, due the fact it has to be him to find her completely broken when he caused it all. The inconvenience is so hysterical she cries.

She wants to scream out that she trusted him before and that got her nowhere, wants to punch and kick and leave him for dead in the street so he knows exactly what pain feels like. She wants to break every bone in his body and kiss him to death at the same time. She is torn, indecisive after years of knowing exactly what she wanted to do and how she was going to do it, and she realises that karma always has a way of coming around to rip your throat out and scissor kick you in the teeth.

This is her pay back for leaving all those years ago, for getting out when she had the chance instead of sticking it out like the fighter she convinced everyone she was. She didn't stay, couldn't stay, fists and slaps and vicious taunts rendered useless against everything he had against her.

She nods, agreeing to go with him and the overhead street lamp illuminates his face as he smiles, the smile that once reduced her to a quivering wreck. Her heart would ache if she still had the muscle. He looks at her with eyes full of pity – _what a sad little girl_ – and she can tell he doesn't see the honey blonde hair and piercing blue eyes underneath the mundane brown she's been sporting to hide her true self. Clearly it is working if the one person she doesn't want to recognise her doesn't bat an eyelid, doesn't give her a quizzical second glance before declaring he knows who she is.

"You stay here and I'll get my car from around the block." He won't stop smiling, but it is forced, the kind you use to be polite to strangers in the street, and she considers her chances of fleeing the scene once he rounds the corner. They're slim, her cut-up legs numb from sitting awkwardly and she knows if she tries to stand she'll just fall back down again.

He is half way down the sidewalk when he turns and shouts to her, "I never told you my name. I'm Freddie Benson."

She faints.

Later she'll blame it on her lack of food, blame it on her emaciated frame being too weak to withstand the abuse she has been putting it through.

* * *

_She said "I've got a broken heart, got a broken heart."  
She said "Can you help me fix it please?"  
_


	2. Heavily Broken

She is seven years two months and nineteen days old when she falls head over heels in love.

* * *

She remembers being seven years old and falling in love with the raven haired boy who sat opposite her in art class. He had the most beautiful inquisitive eyes hidden behind wire framed glasses with thick lenses and a lopsided grin that made her stomach do somersaults. Somehow she always felt sick around him and she blamed it on the butterflies. He'd share his crayons with her when she asked to use them unlike the other boys in the class who would throw them at her head just to see her cry and he'd sharpen them for her when they were blunt.

This caring little boy was called Freddie Benson, the little boy who'd grow up to be the only male brave enough to break Samantha Puckett's heart with a sledgehammer.

One time she drew a picture of the two of them holding hands in a field of flowers and he kissed her on the cheek when she said he could keep it. She wonders if he still has it tucked between his copies of 'The Catcher in the Rye' and 'Hamlet', creased and yellow around the edges after fifteen years seven months and six days.

What she hadn't known back in the year of the millennium was that he would go on to be the only male she'll ever love for the rest of her living days.

* * *

She has been in love for fifteen years nine months and eight days and she can't stop no matter how far she runs away.

* * *

If she could redo the past then she'd do it in a heartbeat. She'd begin by never returning to Seattle, an act that has thrown her to the metaphorical lions who are slowly chewing her into a bloody mess before they spit her back out. She would then retrace her route back through Oregon and California and Nevada, journeying in rewind through love and loss and hope and hurt, until she is back to being a shy little girl. She wants to return to the shy little girl called Samantha to make sure she never falls in love with the stupid boy in her art class with the cute nose and rosebud lips.

If only she could.

She has awoken in an empty room and it is becoming a reoccurring theme in her life because it doesn't matter if it is a filthy motel room, a spacious third floor apartment, a stylish bachelor pad, a bedroom in a quaint semi-detached house, the fact remains that she always finds herself alone. Alone is what she does best because nobody can understand her motives for running, always running, city-to-city and state-to-state, running until her feet bleed and her lungs give out.

She ran away because she was broken beyond repair and needed a purpose and Seattle just reminded her of what she had lost.

A slither of light creeps along the floor as the door opens and he – the best and worst thing to have happened to her life – steps inside, one arm crossed over his chest and the hand on the other tucked in his jeans pocket. Time has been kind to him; he has grown into his bone structure so his strong features don't look quite as peculiar as they once did and he has shot up, much taller than she remembers. Puberty has finally caught up with him and has granted him the gift of being capable of growing facial hair, something that leads to her think of whether he finally grew the leg hair he always wanted.

She needs to stop this train of thought, cut herself off from the past because she isn't Samantha Puckett, she is Stefanie Plackett and she has never met Freddie Benson in her life. He is a kind man who has given her warmth and a temporary roof over her head. That is all.

"You passed out," he states and she wants to punch him in his concerned face because of course she knows she passed out; she isn't suffering from amnesia, no matter how much she thinks she'd benefit from doing so. What she'd give to start afresh with no recollection of the girl she used to be or the people she once knew.

"Stefanie," she murmurs in reply and the name tastes sour on her tongue, only saying it because she figures that he wants to know her name. She withholds her surname because she is cursing herself to this day over to the fact that only she'd manage to swipe the driving licence of a girl with a name so similar to her birth name. The similarity between Plackett and Puckett may ring the alarm bells in his head she wants to keep deadly silent.

"Stefanie," he replies, a small smile tugging at his lips, and she wants to scream at him that she isn't Stefanie; Stefanie is some valley girl with platinum blonde hair and cosmetically enhanced breasts who carries a rat-like dog around in her purse. She wants to scream Sam, Sam, Samantha Fucking Puckett in his as pretty as ever face, yell obscenities and whisper in his ear if he remembers her, using the husky tone she once used to tell him to go faster, harder, deeper when they had sex in the backseat of his car.

"My ex-girlfriend left some of her clothes here when she moved out and I think they'll fit you, even if they might be slightly loose. You need to get out of those wet clothes," his voice is soothing like he is talking to a five-year old girl who has scrapped her knees in the playground and he doesn't want her to start crying.

It hurts, it would pull her heart from her chest and disco dance all over it if it were there, knowing that he has moved on and loved others, girls prettier, nicer, mentally stronger than she will ever be. But what did she expect? He was never the kind of person to wait for a girl who was clearly never going to return for as long as he lived. Of course he has had other girls in the years that have passed since she left, he is an attractive guy and he never did learn how to say no to a beautiful girl if she fluttered her eyelashes hard enough.

Thank you is all she can muster in response.

"I'm assuming you're homeless and I have the spare room so I guess you can stay for a while, I mean, I could do with the company." He pushes forward despite her lack of communication and enthusiasm and she really wishes he would figure out when to keep his mouth shut.

"I'm not homeless," she states bluntly, "I just arrived here and I don't know what the hell I'm doing." She can feel the tears stinging her eyes again and she wants to know when she became such an emotional wreck. Samantha Puckett never cried but Stefanie Plackett seems unable to stop.

She keeps wanting, wishing, wanting, but never does or gets.

It takes him three strides to get across the relatively small room to sit beside her on the couch-turned-bed and he wraps an awkward arm around her shoulders as a form of comfort. She has to stop herself from pushing him away because the heat radiating from his body is too much for her to bear. She also has to hold back from curling into him, snuggling her face into his shoulder like she used to when she got tired while he was still watching some movie they had rented.

"Where are you from?" He sounds genuinely interested and she wants to carelessly cut him up and laugh while he bleeds out onto the carpet.

There she goes again.

"California, but I came here from Carson City."

She elbows his arm away and stands from the bed, not being able to withstand the closeness any longer without imploding from all her secrets and lies.

She starts pacing, up and down and up and down, until a single framed photograph on the wall catches her eye and when she steps closer she can see that it is a photo of the old Samantha and Freddie, back before everything took an ugly turn and plummeted to the deep depths of hell. She cannot remember the photo being taken but she figures they've got to be only sixteen. They've both got large cheesy smiles on their faces that signify that they're in the throws of the honeymoon phase.

"Who's this?" she asks, pointing at the younger, blonder version of who she was. She asks because she wants him to give her a clue, give her anything to cling onto and never let go of, wanting to immerse herself in flashbacks of the first time they kissed on the fire escape on a cold January evening, the first time they made love against his kitchen island while his mother was working the late shift at the hospital. She wants all their firsts while bypassing their lasts.

"Sam," he stammers, thrown off course before he rights himself, "Samantha. She is – was my best friend, my sweetheart for a few blissful years in my teens."

She doesn't turn to look at him, not wanting to see the hurt that is laced in his voice also swimming in his liquid chocolate eyes. The past may still hurt him like a punch in the groin, but her hurt eclipses his. If he knew what she had to do alone in the Nevada desert he'd choke and suffocate on the shock.

"What happened to her?" she tries not to sound too interested, too desperate to know what everyone thought happened to her once she fell off the face of the earth. After not being part of a civil conversation for so long she realises her voice still sounds foreign to her, the sugar coated feminine tone nothing like her sarcastic one from years past.

"She disappeared, but we all assume she's dead. She was too good for this world."

She has to suck in breath between her pursed lips, choking on the intake and she excuses herself to the bathroom, stumbling down the hall until she finds the correct door. She slides the lock across to keep him out and turns on the shower head, stepping beneath it fully clothed and letting herself go. She curls into a foetal position in the tub and weeps for her death, for everyone who has slowly forgotten her over the years because they came to the conclusion that she was dead, that she was never coming back to dreary Seattle to grace them with her presence. She cries for the memories no one will have of her, all of them being locked away in secret boxes that are never to be opened again and she claws at her skin for the mess she's made, the hearts she's broken and the pain she can't heal.

This was a mistake.

* * *

Samantha Mia Puckett was declared dead four years five months and thirty days ago. They never found a body and the investigation was listed a cold case.

* * *

'_Cause I've been broken hearted and maybe I'm guilty of the same.  
But suddenly something started; I'm like a moth into the flame._

* * *

**Disclaimer:** This is a work of fan fiction and I do not own iCarly. Lyrics used in both chapters belong to Victoria Hesketh.  
**A/N:** I don't know how consistent my updates are going to be for the time being because I'm very close to finishing a 12,000+ word Sam/Freddie story. It'll either be one hell of a one-shot or a two/three-part fic so keep your eyes open for that. Thank you for reading and I'm sorry if this is a little too dark and gritty for the tastes of some people.


	3. Dirty Business

**A/N:** This chapter contains inexplicit sexual references.

* * *

She is seventeen years twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes old when she loses her virginity to Freddie Benson.

* * *

The sex happened on her seventeenth birthday and she has since come to realise that many of the significant moments in her life seem to happen on the same day year in year out, be it sleeping with the boy who'd go on to rip her heart out, leaving Seattle on the run or her father tragically passing away.

He had been slow and gentle, not wanting to hurt her, and neither of them had known at the time that he should have gotten it over then because in twelve months time he'd be hurting her to the highest degree. It wasn't a planned occurrence and it certainly wasn't planned to be romantic in the slightest, but his fingers had been soft, barely touching her as they danced over her vast expanse of lightly tanned skin, soft because he didn't want to bruise or break her.

His fingers felt like electric shocks that sent pure ecstasy cursing through her veins.

Drinking a little too much alcohol-spiked punch at her birthday party had been the catalyst that caused her to initiate the foolish actions that subsequently lead to them sleeping together, but she hadn't been drunk, she just felt light-headed, slightly woozy and her skin felt like it was on fire. Freddie had been bone dry sober, laughing as he undressed her in the darkness because she hadn't been able to stand up without the aid of a wall and smiling every time she giggled when his cold fingertips made contact with her burning skin. He shuddered when she'd leant over and spoke explicitly against his heated cheek about how much she wanted him inside her and flushed a deep crimson when her clumsy fingers made hard work of undoing the button on his pants.

He had been tentative, so damn cautious that she'd been close to crying out to tell him to bend and break and pull her apart at the seams and hurt hurt hurt her until she saw stars and felt on cloud nine, until she bled and screamed and begged for more. It was slow, hesitant and uncertain, the thick air around them punctured only by the odd nervous laugh or stifled moan, but it was nice, good at very best. They'd go on to have better sex over the year that followed – in his car, on her couch, in his kitchen, in the shower – the list of locations becoming endless.

That night he let her dig her nails into any of his skin she came into contact with. She left half moon indentations on his sharp hip bones, long but shallow scratches down his slightly muscular arms and tiny cuts sprinkled across his shoulder blades that seeped scarlet blood.

She will never admit it, but she hurt him first, the sadist in her coming out to play and it started an irreversible chain reaction.

A game of who can hurt who the most. A game that they were all too willing to partake in.

* * *

She is nineteen years one month and twenty-seven days old when the first in a line of many men degrades and breaks her in ways Freddie never could.

* * *

She jolts awake to find herself still curled in the bottom of the bathtub, sodden through with her clothes clinging to her like second skin and she should be freezing cold, but her skin feels ablaze, like her insides are trying to contain an inferno.

The water must have shut off a while ago, the tank empty.

She feels disgusting, having not thought about him like that and certainly having not dreamt about him like that in the longest time, memories of steamy liaisons and embraces of passion punished to the dark corners of her mind. She hasn't felt this kind of repugnance towards herself since she buried what was left of their love, buried what were the remains of Samantha Puckett and Freddie Benson as a couple in the Nevada desert. It tugs at her insides and she wants to vomit until she is empty of her deceit.

She removes her clothes, sick to her stomach, and wraps herself in a blue towel she finds hanging on the back of the door and it matches the turquoise tiled walls and cerulean linoleum floor – his favourite colour used to be blue, presumably still is, followed by green and red. Bleary eyed, she finds her way down the hall to the room she'd fled several hours earlier and inside the curtains have been thrown open and natural light is flooding the room, the sky outside appearing grey and miserable and it looks like the clouds are ready to release another onslaught of rain.

They don't call Seattle 'Rain City' just because it has a certain ring to it.

Changing into the sleeping clothes he had left her – a large button-up shirt that falls to her mid-thighs and a pair of elasticated pyjama shorts that she has to double knot at the waist so they don't fall to her ankles – she turns to stare out of the window and she does not recognise the view except for the Space Needle standing tall and thin in the distance. She dries her wet hair with the towel and realises she needs to find a way back to her car so she can retrieve a box of hair dye and more coloured contacts. Her brunette hair is gradually fading to a mousy brown, the blonde still fighting to emerge through the unnatural colour, and she needs to change her lenses.

The prospect of explaining why her eyes have gone from brown to blue frightens her, knowing she'll end up yelling "I'm not the person you think I am!" in his bewildered face.

Slumping against the wall (she notes it is a mint green colour), she begins to think of why she is in freaking Seattle. She doesn't think she came back with a specific reason, but her memory is shot to hell; she thinks she simply wanted to revisit the city that holds so many poignant memories, revisit the place where she grew up and fell apart within the space of eighteen short years. She hadn't known if he would still be here, half-expecting him to have left for Hollywood to work as a technical producer on some lame comedy sketch show. She didn't have any intentions of seeing him, and absolutely no plans involving being taken home by him because he thought she was some homeless girl who needed his sympathy.

She does not need his goddamn sympathy.

And she isn't here to jump Freddie's bones because she can't think of anything sexual without feeling violently ill and she can't understand why she keeps having this reaction. After all, she's been there, done that and got the stupid t-shirt that reads 'I Slept with Freddie Benson' in flashing fluorescent LED lights.

She assumes she is here to right her wrongs but she is well on the way to making her wrongs worse by letting him think she is someone else.

She finds her way to the kitchen, observing that the floor plan is completely different to that of the apartments in the Bushwell Plaza where he used to live and it hits her that she has no idea where in the city she is. She has been absent for nearly five years and the time away has made short work of destroying the mental street map of Seattle she used to know like the back of her hand. At this rate she's never going to find her car without his help.

Freddie is sat at the kitchen island, a mug of coffee in front of him and he is staring intently at a sheet of paper in his left hand. His dark hair is a mess on the top of his head, his eyes tired and the stubble on his face is a shade darker than it was the previous evening. What aggravates her is that he is still so attractive, if not more so. She half wishes he'd grown up to be repulsive looking because it would have made this unfortunate meeting a hell of a lot easier.

"Uh, hello," she says and lifts her right hand in some form of half-assed greeting.

"Morning Stefanie," he replies.

Damn, he's chirpy; he never used to be a morning person, preferring to sleep until midday at the weekend which resulted in her often kicking him out of the bed. He moves his attention from the piece of paper to her and penetrates her with his eyes and they're full of worry and questions and confusion, "are you okay?" and "why did you spend the remainder of the night in the bathroom?" desperate to escape his mouth.

"How do you take your coffee?" he finally says, pushing his 'other' questions to one side.

"White with two sugars, please." Samantha always took hers black, the same colour as her soul.

He stands and goes to make her the first hot drink she has had in a week, placing the paper in his hands face down on the marble island top. A lump forms in her oesophagus as she casually reaches out and flips the paper over while his back is turned. It is creased and turning yellow around the edges but she can still make out the heavy crayon drawing, the stick figures holding hands, one with a mass of yellow hair and the other with a scribbled mess of brown and the figures are surrounded by a multicoloured explosion of flowers. The nausea takes over again and she is hit with flashbacks of drawing the picture and handing it to him and getting a kiss on the cheek as a thank you, his small lips sticky on her face from the candy he'd been eating all morning.

She never thought he'd still have it, thought it was destined to a one-way trip to the trash can once she left him. How he can look at it without feeling immense hate is beyond her.

"Who drew this? A niece, nephew, cousin or something?" she asks, finding enjoyment in asking him a question she knows will make him squirm in discomfort.

"No, uh, Sam drew me that when we were seven years old." He sounds unsure of whether he should be divulging such information with a stranger and he doesn't pick her up on how the paper had been the other way up before he'd turned his back.

If only he knew who she really was.

"I don't know why I have it or why I got it out after all this time. I guess I can't let go." He gives her a sad smile as he pours boiling water into a porcelain mug and the idea that he has never fully given up on Samantha blindsides her, knocking her into the middle of a busy dual carriageway to meet her untimely death under the wheels of a truck.

His refusal to let go is swiftly opening up endless opportunities for her. Some of them positive, some negative, and some utterly cruel and demeaning.

"Did you love her?" she presses, wondering if she can make him cry because she'd just love that. She'll laugh and sing and dance in a pool of his tears as he spills the contents of his hardened heart onto the kitchen floor.

"Somebody likes to ask awkward questions."

"I'm just naturally inquisitive," she flashes him a grin but it is false and feels foreign on her face. She isn't naturally inquistive, she is desperate for facts.

_I want to know everything I missed the first time around. You never told me you loved me and I've despised you for it every day for the past four years eleven months and twenty-eight days. I hate you and I love you and I want to rip your heart out with my teeth and use your guts as a noose to hangs our heartless bodies from the curtain rail._

"I loved, love her more than anything."

She's too slow and he's beaten her to it, stringing her body up with her own guts, leaving her hanging like a piece of meat in a butchers window and he's grinning as she struggles against the restraints before her body goes limp and lifeless. He's gone straight for the jugular, sinking his teeth in and there is no going back from this. She is pressing her hands into the bloody wound in her neck, trying to to suppress the bleeding he's caused, but it is seeping over her fingers and staining them red. She can't rewind and never leave when she was eighteen just as she cannot make him take back what he said about still loving the girl who is still inside her somewhere.

She's got a big, bloody mess on her hands.

* * *

She is twenty-two with a broken heart that is four years eleven months and twenty-eight days old. In two days it will be five years.

* * *

When she left Seattle she had enough money to her name to get by, not enough for her to throw her money away by staying in fancy establishments, but she had plenty to keep her on the move. She had stolen cash from her mother's purse – she knew the insane, constantly drunk woman would never notice the money or her daughter disappearing – and she had guiltily lifted a couple of twenties from Freddie's wallet to add to her small stash of savings that she kept behind the headboard of her bed where her mother couldn't find it and blow it all on tequila. But money only got her so far when she was still interested in feeding herself, paying for petrol for her car and the alternate nights spent in cheap roadside inns that smelt like there were dead bodies hidden under the floorboards.

The nights in between having the comfort of a bed she'd sleep in the backseat of her heap-of-junk car.

The money she kept folded up in wads of a hundred dollars and stuffed inside her bra ran out in due course, she thinks it happened somewhere between Sacramento and San Francisco, and she had to stop running long enough to earn a wage in a greasy truck stop as a waitress/sex object for men to ogle at. It made her skin crawl, but money is money, how she got it wasn't an issue for her. Fat sweaty old men, balding black toothed idiots passing through from the Deep South, all the types of men she had spent her life trying to avoid reveled in grabbing her breasts in their meaty hands as she served them with tight lipped smiles or slapping her backside as she walked away, salivating over her barely legal body.

She didn't stay in the job very long; the only advantage of getting molested by filthy perverts was that she got tipped heavily. She felt like a prostitute, being paid for a quick slap 'n' grab, and it is ironic when she looks back on it because that is exactly what she later found herself becoming when she hit an all-time low.

Eventually she stopped using money – speeding away from gas stations with a tank full of free fuel, running from cafes owned by little old ladies without leaving a couple of dollars on the table for her coffee, coaxing gullible men into buying her drinks in bars with the promise of a good time that they never got. She evaded getting into trouble with the cops, using a fluttering of eyelashes and her impressive cleavage to get her out of any situation.

She felt like Bonnie missing her Clyde, Nancy without her Sid, Love devoid of her Cobain. She was missing what made her feel whole and no amount of self-punishment or recklessness would fill of the empty crevices that had opened up inside of her, ripping the remains of her internal organs to shreds.

She had no road map (she'd lent it to Freddie two days prior to her departure) and no satellite navigation system installed, instead driving wherever she wanted to and only knowing the towns she was passing through and the cities she was staying in from a vague awareness of the signs on the highway. She went from Washington to Oregon to California to finally Nevada, travelling the length of the west coast and then some more. Her bad sense of direction (not just in driving, but in life and love too) sent her from Santa Maria to Las Vegas via Reno, completely wrong and possibly the most time-wasting gas-guzzling way imaginable that didn't involved detouring through Virginia along the way.

It took her a little over a year to find her way to Las Vegas. Upon her arrival she found a new way to make cold hard cash in the city that never sleeps. It was not in the most conventional of ways, but selling her body to strangers became like second nature once she shut off her mind and emotions, becoming an empty doll to be abused and violated by drunken and often aggressive men. She'd put on a mask, barely recognisable under the thick layers of make-up, and she'd tell herself that it wasn't really her, it was someone stronger, someone doing it because it was necessary for her survival.

She sold her soul to the devil, an act she has come to deeply regret.

* * *

She spends two years four months and eleven days in Las Vegas, the longest she stays in one place since fleeing Washington State. The bright lights, the pure seediness, the dirty underground movement of Sin City drawing her in and refusing to release her, sharp teeth and claws digging into her soft flesh.

* * *

_I'm falling like a snowflake; catch me quick before I disappear.  
I'm fading like the sun and soon as I'm gone everything will come undone._

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I still do not own iCarly and until otherwise mentioned all lyrics used at the end of each chapter belong to Victoria Hesketh.

**A/N:** I hope I'm not confusing anybody with how this seems to be jumping from here to there and back again. I realise that including a back story and the main story at the same time is complicated (hell, I'm tying myself in multiple knots trying to figure everything out and I'm the one writing the damn thing!), but it will all make sense eventually, I promise. Give me a chance :) And thank you to everyone who has reviewed this fic, added it to their favourites or put it on story alert. Also thanks to those who are just reading this, the number of page hits is phenomenal. It means a lot.


	4. Collateral Damage

She is twelve years four months and thirty days old when she realises that hate is the best disguise for unrequited love.

* * *

She'd always been aware of not making a huge song and dance over her 'slightly larger than a crush but definitely smaller than a stalker-status obsession' love for Freddie, preferring to keep it under wraps to save herself the jibes she was bound to get from her peers for liking "the dork", the label he was widely associated with by the time they hit junior high. Instead she favoured adoring him in silence, being fixated on him from a far, staring at him from across the room while wanting to go back to seven years old and crappy crayon drawings. But one day is all it took for somebody _something_ to flick the switch inside her labelled 'Do Not Touch' and she became a fiery ball of violently hormonal pre-teen girl, hating everyone and everything, hating him in particular.

The hate came easily to her because deep down she'd always despised him for never loving her back, loathed him for leading her on with what she later came to realise were only 'friendly' hugs and kisses. He saw her as a friend, a best friend, and nothing more.

It started out small, calling him a cruel name here and there, more often than not combining his birth name with his nickname to create the now infamous Freddork and she avoided eye contact with him whenever she verbally attacked him so it never really hit her how much her change from sweet-to-evil wounded him. Seven weeks down the line and it escalated to the extent that she brought in violence, just skin pinches and hair tugging to begin with, but the more he reacted the more she felt it was necessary to hurt him.

She would brutally kiss him with her fists. She'd punch him in the jaw and show her love in the spilling of his blood, oozing from his mouth and dripping from his chin to the floor. She'd embrace him with vicious kicks to the shins, her affection seen in the form of bruises that coloured purple and black and blue. She'd leave him with marks and scars, something for him to treasure, something that labelled him hers, even if he did not know it at the time.

* * *

She resents him for three years five months and nineteen days.

She is fifteen years nine months and eighteen days old when he admits his love for her, pulling her to one side after gym class and pressing a chaste kiss to her virgin lips and in that moment she swears her world came to a standstill, if only for a few seconds.

* * *

"Better late than never," she teases him for the next two years two months and twelve days.

* * *

Is it possible for her to fall in love with the same person for the second time in her life? And it is at all feasible for her to feel anything other than the intense, raging detestation she should have towards the person who broke her heart into a million minuscule pieces? Is it love or just pure lust from being deprived of the man who made a woman of her, or at least a woman of who she used to be, for so long?

It is stupid, so fucking stupid because she knows what she is letting herself in for, she's been there and done it all before, and if she had any sense she'd have been running in the opposite direction as soon as he left her alone the previous evening. But she established that she lost all her common sense a long time ago. Theoretically, falling head over heels all over again shouldn't even be on the agenda because he's only been back in her life for approximately ten hours and even the most fickle hearted girl couldn't fall in love in such a short space of time. She's stupid, gullible and easily lead and she is punishing herself to hell for the second time in her twenty-two years eleven months and twenty-eight days of existence.

Maybe she's just taken a liking to getting burnt by hellfire.

She blames him and everything he has done for her since he found her half-dressed and freezing cold on the sidewalk for the conflicting emotions she is having. It is the caring gestures like putting a roof over her head, supplying her with clothes, pumping her full of coffee and every other little thing he's done that are the reasons behind her imminent fall from grace and her tumble back into love or lust or whatever the hell it is (that is if she had any grace remaining, having lost most of it mere weeks before her heart went kaput and crumbled into dust like an age-old stone).

In retrospect, he's always been the kind of person to go out of his way to help others, be it the time he gave all the money in his wallet to the homeless woman and her small child when they were on their way to their first date at the cinema or the time he gave his favourite jacket to the young boy who'd been rescued after falling into the rowing lake at the park. It is no surprise that he took her home so willingly without knowing whether or not she was a man-hating serial killer and she half-wishes that she was exactly that. She'd have butchered him by now. He's become bit of a saint-like figure, trusting easily, far too eager to help and she hates him for it with every fibre of her being.

But just because he is some kind of do-gooder does not mean he is not capable of lapsing into wrong-doing. She has experienced his 'other' side first hand.

At present she is stuck in the mother of all traffic jams while Freddie uselessly pounds on his horn every five minutes, but no amount of noisy beeping is making the cars in front of them move any faster. Somehow over breakfast – they'd had cereal and she had to bite her tongue until she tasted the metallic hint of blood so she did not blurt out that they used to eat the same cereal every time she stayed over at his apartment – he'd gotten her talking about how she came to being in Seattle and she'd mentioned her currently lost car parked up beside some warehouses with her limited belongings inside it. He'd promptly insisted on helping her get to her car despite her urges that she was perfectly capable of doing it herself, but he'd been adamant in assisting her and when he looked at her with his chocolate brown orbs full of the bloody concern he seems to be overflowing with she couldn't exactly say no because his disappointment would have gutted her.

She is sat in the passenger seat of his car and it is a throwback to being sixteen without a care in the world about the fact they were breaking the driving regulations by speeding down the highway with the windows wound down, stereo playing soft rock and the wind blowing her long blonde hair in her face while he laughed. He still has the same car he had when he first got his permit and she is being bombarded with memories of the times she has spent inside the vehicle. She can see the ghosts of their former selves having sex on the back seat, the car rocking side to side as the windows steam up and she can see them curled around each other afterwards in post-coital bliss. She'd want to throw herself out of the car door in the hopes of getting decapitated by a passing oil tanker or something similarly large and lethal, anything that'll cause lasting damage, if they or the vehicles around them were actually moving.

They've already attempted conversation but it didn't get particularly far, stopping after he questioned her about her age (she lied, saying she was already twenty-three and not two days off her twenty-third birthday) and asked whether or not she'd been to Seattle before. She'd answered no, but only after she fought an internal battle with Samantha who desperately wanted to tell him that of course she's been to Seattle before, she lived here for the majority of her fucked-up life. She won the battle out of sheer determination for wanting to keep her 'secret' safe, for now.

Stefanie is in control; Samantha is going to have to take a backseat.

"Thanks for the clothes," she says because she is desperate for an excuse to break the atmosphere that has fallen upon them, gesturing at the white cotton dress and stone wash jeans he'd dug out for her earlier that morning. She's still barefoot though. The dress had been her best option because it didn't matter if it was a little loose around the waist, but the jeans had been an issue, and eventually she had to opt to borrow a leather belt from Freddie rather than suffer the embarrassment of the jeans making an escape to her ankles as soon as she walked five steps.

She has always known she's on the slim side, but when did she get so tiny, like, anorexic tiny? She hasn't been paying attention to anything over the years, not really, and food has been the last thing on her mind. It wasn't out of choice because she's always loved her food, well, Samantha did.

"It's fine, really, it isn't like Wendy is going to be wanting them back any time soon," he replies, but he sounds agitated, the bad traffic clearly pissing him off, just like the time he'd tried to drive them to Port Angeles for a day-out that never happened in the end.

_Wendy, Wendy 'Little Miss Perfect' L__loyd_. Of course it would have been Wendy Lloyd, with her dark red hair and adorable facial features and cheek pinching habits who had nabbed him for herself as soon as Samantha's retreating back could no longer be seen in the distance, although she's glad to an extent. At least it hadn't been 'her', the devil incarnate, evil personified in a deceivingly innocent girl. The girl who'd had everything at her disposal and still wanted more more more. The girl who was able to make the entire teen male population of Seattle fall at her feet just so she could kick them away like they were disease-ridden stray cats. The girl with no soul and no compassion only her good looks – her luscious brunette hair and 'butter wouldn't melt' hazel eyes – on her side, the girl whose looks were also her weapons of mass destruction. At least it hadn't been the girl behind the rise and fall of Samantha Mia Puckett who had managed to sink her feline talons into Freddie as soon as she was out of the picture.

At least it hadn't been Carly Elizabeth Shay, Satan's love child with a Greek goddess.

* * *

_You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling._

* * *

**A/N:** Quote is from Richard Siken's 'You Are Jeff'.  
Apologies if this seems a bit... blah, it has been one of those weeks. As always, thank you for reading and putting up with my sporadic updates.


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